Raspberry Pi BMO Plays Games and Accepts Voice Commands

It’s Raspberry Pi time — come on and grab your friends! One part of the Pi community we love to see is the side that gets into prop making. Makers have shown over the years some serious creativity when it comes to bringing things into the real world from their favorite media franchises like this Die Hard RFID reader or this Simpson’s TV replica. Today we’re sharing another cool prop creation from a maker known as Goguigo_Tatolino over at Reddit. Using our favorite SBC, he’s created a custom BMO game system that doubles as a functional desktop.

BMO is a character from the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time. In the show, BMO plays games and can interact with the cast by talking and walking around. Resembling a Game Boy, the protagonists have been seen using BMO like a console to play video games. This BMO gaming system has a Raspberry Pi inside along with a screen that alternates between BMO faces.

Goguigo_Tatolino’s BMO system has a few different features ranging from a working desktop that can be operated using a wireless keyboard and trackpad to video game emulation. Because it’s Raspberry Pi-based, you can use a wide variety of emulators with it like RetroPie or Retro Arch. It also accepts voice commands using speech-to-text software. 

The software for the project was created by another maker known as BYOBMO at GitHub. They created a BMO operating system that makes it easy to develop your own BMO. It has two modes that you can alternate between including a desktop mode and a face mode that shows different BMO expressions. You can find more details about it over at GitHub.

Goguigo_Tatolino created a custom shell for his BMO that looks just like the one from the show. It’s complete with a nice paint job that perfectly resembles BMO’s color scheme, down to the buttons on the front. We’re not sure if they’re using a Raspberry Pi 4B or 3B in this project, either would work. But it might be a 4B as there appears to be two micro HDMI ports on the front.

If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, you can check out the original project thread shared to Reddit by Goguigo_Tatolino.